In modern communications systems, a digital receiver is a device tasked with, among other things, receiving, digitizing, demodulating, and decoding a communications signal transmitted by a distant transmitter. Such communications signals, however, are subject to distortion, and the signal received at the receiver is thus typically a distorted version of the transmitted signal. Although receivers typically include modules designed to detect and correct some of the effects of distortion in the received signal, prior art modules have only been able to reliably do so when the distortion is less than a threshold. Simply put, the prior art has been unable to reliably process signals that are excessively distorted. Some embodiments of the invention provide improvements in a receiver that allow for more reliable processing of distorted signals and thus can reliably process received signals having greater levels of distortion than prior art receivers.
Typically, the wider the frequency band in which a signal is transmitted, the greater the signal is distorted before arriving at the receiver. Moreover, the greater the number of binary bits that the symbols in the signal represent, the less distortion the receiver can tolerate. For these reasons, some embodiments of the present invention can be particularly well suited for so called wideband communications systems and/or communications systems in which the symbols in the transmitted signal represent a relatively high number of binary bits. The present invention, however, is not limited to any minimum transmission frequency band width or the use of symbols that represent any minimum number of binary bits.